by Frank Tayell
She went back out into the hall and found her son wrestling a pine wardrobe through the door of the next flat. Together they carried it down the stairs and out into the street.
Three more undead had appeared while they’d been inside. Their bodies lay where they’d been killed. The four people standing guard chatted quietly as they leaned on spears and axes, with their eyes glued to the approaching road. It was…
“Barbaric,” she said.
“What’s that?” Jay asked.
“I never realised that word could mean anything other than something evil. But that’s what we are, isn’t it? Barbarians looting civilisation, taking clothes and furniture that we don’t have the technology to make, and which we’ll discard after one use.”
“So?”
“So I can’t tell if I should find it funny or terrifying.”
They carried the wardrobe back to the Tower, leaving it on the other side of the barrier that had protected the grassed moat from tourists seeking something more comfortable than concrete to sit on.
“There’s still no sign of Tuck,” Jay said, and Nilda knew what he was really asking, but he was right, there was no point in lies and half-truths.
“You want to know when she’ll be back?” she asked. “Well, how long is a piece of string? All we can know is that the people we can see are alive. That’s how it’s going to be from now on. For me, for you, for your children. Until she comes back, we truly won’t know what happened. And there’s no point dwelling on it.”
“If she’s dead, she’s dead,” Jay said. “I know that. And I’ll miss her if she’s gone, but what I meant was that if she is dead, then what do we do about Graham?”
“I don’t know.” And as she went back into the apartment block, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t come up with an answer.
It was just before noon, and long after Nilda had stopped counting how many trips she’d made between the apartment block and the moat, when she saw Greta coming out from the castle.
“You collected it all?” Nilda asked.
“We did,” Greta said. “But McInery didn’t come back with us.”
“She didn’t?” Nilda had vaguely registered that the woman wasn’t with her group, but hadn’t expected her to have gone out with Greta. If anything, she’d imagined McInery would have found some quiet spot to wait out the hard, tedious work. “Why not?”
“She said that she’d look for more supplies and take her time coming back. To spy out the lay of the land, she said.”
“Oh?” Nilda said. She wanted to ask whether Greta thought that was suspicious, but at the same time didn’t want to spread her own fears. “Did she say anything else?”
“No.” Greta shrugged. “I said she was crazy to wander around out there on her own. You know what she said? That the worst case scenario was there was one less person to eat that food.”
And that wouldn’t be the worst possible outcome, but again Nilda kept the thought to herself. “She’ll come back or she won’t.”
“Exactly,” Greta said. “And Aisha wanted me to tell you that lunch is on its way. About five minutes.”
Before eating, Nilda went to look in on Chester. She badly needed someone’s advice.
“You’ve got to wake up,” she whispered. “Chester I…” Before she’d worked out what she was going to say, Chester groaned.
“Chester? Chester? Can you hear me?”
There was another groan. Then another, and then a grunt that might have been a snore. Nilda stayed by his bedside for a few minutes more, but he didn’t wake.
“It’s limiting factors,” Styles said. There had been a lull in the conversation, and the children’s chatter was growing increasingly stilted in the sleepy atmosphere of the dark hall. That meant the man’s voice had carried far beyond the table at which he’d been having a spirited debate with Yvonne, Constance, Janine, and a trio of the older children.
“What do you mean?” Kevin called out from a table closer to the fire.
“Oh, right, sorry,” Styles said. “Basically that there are a limited number of hours in the day. I was talking about gas lighting and how that was the real trigger to modernisation. The ability to work after dusk without relying on candles allowed people to read, sew, clean, and… well, it’s barely seven o’clock. A year ago, I wouldn’t even think about turning in until eleven, but now I’ll be in bed in a couple of hours and asleep not long after. The only reason it won’t be sooner is that it’s a damn sight—” Janine tutted. Nilda smiled as Styles continued. “Sorry. It’s a darn sight warmer in here than in my room. Don’t get me wrong,” he added, “this is nice. Sitting with people, just talking, you can’t know how good it is to do that. For all of us. Maybe it’s the castle outside, I mean, you can feel the age of this place, but… well, this dawn to dusk lifestyle, it’s all a bit medieval, isn’t it? Um… sorry,” he added, and waved his hand to take in the group at his table. “It was more of a history lesson than a speech.”
“Well, I agree with you,” Kevin said. “But what can we do about it beyond look for more batteries, candles, and wind-up torches?”
“That’s the wrong question,” Nilda said. “We found a few hundred batteries today, but even if they all have some charge, they’ll only power a torch for a few weeks. I think we found about forty candles.” She glanced at Greta for confirmation. “But most of those were tea-lights. Not exactly something you can read by. We’ve used up more tonight than we’ll find tomorrow, so we need to ask ourselves how we can do things differently.”
“Like what?” Kevin asked.
“Well, okay,” Nilda said realising that everyone was looking at her in the expectation of an answer she didn’t have. “Take gas lighting for instance. I mean, that won’t work as the gas was cut off, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have electricity. What about wind turbines? If we found some of those we could use them to charge electric lights.”
“Tuck and I looked,” Jay said. “And we couldn’t find any. Not near Oxford Street, anyway.”
“There was a… a steam engine,” Xiao said, speaking slowly as he searched for the words. “In the science museum. It was a…” There was a pause, and then he gave a frustrated shrug. “They had a picture of it. Powering lights. A recent picture. A show… ah, a…” he smiled as the word came to him. “A demonstration. Ten years ago.”
“Well, that’s something,” Kevin said. “So how about it? Could we bring it here? How big was it?”
Xiao thought for a moment, and again gave up. “Big,” he stated. “Bigger than the coach.”
“Then it’s an idea for when the zombies are no longer an immediate threat,” Nilda said, and saw she’d burst the bubble of hope that had enveloped most of the room. “But that might not be long off. And look, if it works now, it will still work in six months time. It would be nice, but it’s not the most pressing problem.”
“Starvation,” McInery said. “That’s the real danger, yes?”
“The boats will bring food, won’t they?” a boy asked. “Eamonn will send them. He promised to, didn’t he?”
“We have to assume he won’t,” McInery said, far more bluntly than Nilda considered appropriate. “Which means we need to look at our situation differently. We can plant in March, perhaps before, perhaps after, but that’s still six months away.”
“And what are you saying?” Nilda asked, though she thought she could guess.
“That we need to go out and find more,” McInery said, and it wasn’t what Nilda had expected her to say. “This was a city of nearly ten million people. There must be more food, somewhere. I may not have found anything today, but I’m going to go out again tomorrow, and I’ll keep going out until I find enough. If I die, that will be one less mouth to feed. That is the cruel mathematics of our situation.”
“For now we have food,” Nilda said quickly. “And we’ve enough for the next few weeks. We need to give Eamonn time to reach Anglesey, and that gives us time to see what other ideas we c
an come up with.”
“The museum is near Kensington, right?” Jay asked. “And we nearly got the walkways as far as that back during the summer. We only stopped because there were better places to search. So what if we build more from here to connect with those we’ve already built. Then we could lift the steam engine up onto the roofs.”
“How?” Kevin asked.
“Pulleys and ropes,” Jay said. “It would take a lot of effort, but—”
“No,” Styles cut in. “You can’t. A walkway leading from here would just provide Graham with an easy way in.”
Nilda sighed. She’d been waiting for someone to bring him up and knew that she wasn’t the only one trying to avoid mentioning the man. She searched around for something to say, something that would buoy their spirits, but it was Styles who spoke.
“No, walkways are out, but tell everyone what you were saying about radio,” he said, speaking to Yvonne.
She threw him an irritated look. “Well, I was saying that it would have to be…” she stopped, her eyes on Greta. “Look, we all hope Eamonn will make it, but we need to be prepared if he doesn’t.”
Greta shrugged. “What was this about a radio?” she asked.
“I think I can build one,” Yvonne said.
“Really?” Nilda asked, unable to keep the surprise from her voice. She remembered Chester had considered the same thing, but had dismissed it as nothing more than a wishful fantasy.
“It wouldn’t be elaborate,” Yvonne said. “And it wouldn’t be able to receive a signal, but I think I, or we, could build a transmitter.”
“That’s why we were talking about electricity and light,” Janine said.
“And what are the problems?” Nilda asked. “What do we need that we don’t have?”
“I’m not sure,” Yvonne said. “This isn’t anything I’ve done since school. I’m basing it all on a few hours looking through the textbooks.”
“But honestly,” Nilda said. “Do you really think we could do this?”
Yvonne didn’t speak immediately. “Maybe,” she eventually said. “I’ll need to look into it.”
“If you could…” Nilda began, and knew by the sudden hope reflected in the faces around her that she didn’t need to finish the sentence.
“It’s not giving up on Eamonn,” Nilda said after the meal was over and people began drifting off to sleep.
“I know,” Greta replied. “It’s about a tangible hope. Something people can cling on to; some reason to keep going. I understand that. But what do we do in two weeks when Eamonn hasn’t returned, no boat has shown up, and we realise no one is listening to the radio? Aren’t we just finding things to cling to in the hope that some piece of good fortune will come our way?”
“Let’s just take it one day at a time,” Nilda said. But that same question was at the forefront of her mind. The night before she’d said that nothing had changed. That was true. They’d hoped to find enough food for six months in Kent. Instead they’d found forty-four more mouths to feed. There was no way of changing the mathematics of the situation. So hope Eamonn makes it, she thought as she went back into Chester’s sick room. Hope Yvonne is right. She sat down by his bed. Above all, she hoped he would wake.
28th September
Chester groaned in his sleep and that woke Nilda from hers. It was still dark, and the lamp had gone out. She groped around until she found it. After a dozen slow turns of the plastic crank the bulb began to glow.
The watch said it was just gone four a.m. She hadn’t intended spending another night sitting by Chester’s sickbed, but around midnight when she’d stood up to leave, she’d thought he’d spoken. Around two, with no more sound from him, she’d returned to her room and picked up a couple of Hana’s ledgers. She’d been trying to find what plans the vet had made. It seemed that a few minutes of leafing through them was the tonic she’d needed to finally send her to sleep.
The bulb’s light was dim. She tried giving the crank a few more quick turns. It didn’t get any brighter.
“It must be broken,” she said, and realised she’d spoken out loud. She glanced at Chester, gauging whether there was any reaction from him. “The torch, I mean. I think the bulb must be wearing out. Or do they wear out? Perhaps it’s the wires, or the battery isn’t taking the charge. Either way…” She reached out for the box of matches, struck one, and held it to a stubby candle. “Either way, we’ll soon be down to wax. And when that runs out, well, I don’t know what we’ll do, and I’m pretty certain no one else does either. Last night, we talked about a steam—”
There was a grunt and a cough. She sat up.
“Chester? Are you awake?”
There was a croak that might have been intended to be a word.
“Here,” she said. “Water.” She poured a small measure into a cup and held it to his lips with one hand while lifting his head with the other. He drank. Not much more than a sip, but he did it on his own. Only when she lowered his head back to the pillow did she remember that she wasn’t meant to move it in case it was fractured.
“You must have a thick head,” she said, and found she was grinning. “If it was broken, you’d have screamed by now.”
He didn’t say anything, but a hand was slowly raised to his bandaged head.
“Relax, rest. You’re alive; that’s all that matters,” she said, though she was speaking more to herself than to him. She’d been certain he was going to die, that the injuries were too great and, of course, there was so little that they could do. “You’re alive,” she repeated, but Chester had fallen asleep. When Fogerty came in an hour later, he still hadn’t woken.
“He’s alive. He didn’t speak, but he did raise his hand. He woke,” Nilda said.
“Of course he did. He’s a fighter, that one,” the soldier said.
“But he didn’t speak,” Nilda said. “Maybe he can’t, maybe—”
“Give it time. Go and get some air; that’s the cure you need.”
“Yes. Of course.”
The brief flash of hope had been drowned by the harsh reality. It would be weeks before Chester was on his feet again.
She found her feet had taken her up to the path along the castle wall. Almost reflexively she found herself staring out at the dark river.
“There’s no boat,” Kevin said. “I’ve been checking every half hour. But don’t tell Aisha.”
She hadn’t noticed him standing in the shadows of the doorway. “Are you on guard duty?” she asked.
“I am,” he said. “At least until the sun comes up. Fogerty said being awake all night is good practice for when the baby comes.”
“He’s right about that,” Nilda said. “And I didn’t even consider the sound a crying baby would make. We’ll have to soundproof a room somewhere.”
“It’s already in hand,” Kevin said. “And if we keep blocking off the roads, we’ll keep the undead from getting close enough to hear her cries. Listen.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Just listen. There. You hear that? It’s the parakeets.”
“Have more come here to roost?” she asked.
“It’s not that, it’s the barriers. The undead are a further fifty metres away. If we keep doing that, keep blocking the roads, then by the time she’s born no zombies will ever get near her.”
“You hope it’s a girl?”
“I switch back and forth,” Kevin said. “Aisha doesn’t care as long as the baby’s healthy. And that’s our real worry. With the virus and the undead, I mean.”
“I’m sure she will be,” Nilda said, though it was something she hadn’t even considered. But like so much else, there was nothing she could do about it.
She continued following the path along the wall. On the north side, she saw a figure walking towards her. It was McInery, a pair of bayonets strapped to her belt, a battle-axe in her hand, and an almost empty pack on her back.
“You’re going outside?” Nilda asked.
“I said I would,” McInery replie
d.
“And no one is going with you?”
“It’s not my place to volunteer others,” McInery said. “There will be no manna from heaven, nor anything else unless we go out and get it.”
“Of course. Where are you going to look?”
“The City of London, to begin with. Those banks and offices all had meeting rooms. We searched some back in the early days of the outbreak, but not many.”
After all this time Nilda doubted there would be anything left to find, but she kept that to herself. There was something in McInery’s expression that hadn’t been there before. Determination, perhaps? She couldn’t tell. “Good luck,” she said, instead.
“And to you,” McInery replied.
As Nilda helped steady the rope while McInery climbed down, she wondered again whether the woman was being sincere. She found her hand had moved from the rope to the sword at her belt. No, she’d made that decision when Chester had asked her whether she wanted him to kill her. Fogerty was right, that shot could have been meant for McInery. And the more she thought about it, the more that made sense. Whether McInery was involved with the theft or she’d had some other plan, if she’d wanted anyone dead she could have slit their throats in their sleep. She regripped the rope and let that particular fear go. Dark suspicions always came before dawn, and only if they lingered in the daylight were they to be believed.
As she watched McInery disappear into the ruins beyond the Tower, Nilda turned to the other, more obvious problem with the woman’s expedition into London. At most she would return with a few kilos of supplies, little more than a person would consume in a day. Wherever she found food today would be barren tomorrow. Each trip would take them further from the Tower until all about them was nothing but brick and dirt.
“I’m getting as bad as Stewart,” she said, speaking to dispel the fear. “Obsessing over food. We’ve enough for today.” And she took that as a sign that she should help get breakfast ready.
